The Scribbly Man

5

Richard charged through the hallways and corridors behind a frantic Cassia toward the room where Kahlan had taken Nolo for questioning—a place where she could use her Confessor power without having to worry about hurting anyone else.

A lone man had never been a threat to Kahlan. Rather, her Confessor power made her an overwhelming threat to him. Richard couldn’t imagine what could have gone wrong. Whatever had happened, he didn’t want to waste time questioning Cassia—

He just wanted to get to Kahlan.

When Richard had raced out of the great hall, Shale had followed close on his heels. The rest of the Mord-Sith ran in a cluster behind them. Behind the Mord-Sith a large force of men of the First File flooded through the narrow halls and wide passageways like a raging torrent of dark water. All their weapons hanging from belts filled the halls with a metallic jangle.

As they abruptly spilled into a round entrance hall that was painted white, Cassia slid to a stop on the polished black and white marble floor.

“Here, Lord Rahl! This is where they are.” Cassia frantically shook her hand toward a heavy oak door, then raced around a table with stone mountain lions for legs. “In here! I tried hard as I could but I couldn’t get the door open.”

Richard could hear eerie shrieks and howls coming from the other side of the door.

“Why is this door bolted on the outside?” he yelled at Cassia as he slammed the bolt back out of the way.

“It—it wasn’t, Lord Rahl,” she stammered in surprise. “I swear. We never bolted the door. As I stood guard, everything suddenly shook like lightning had hit the palace, but there was no sound of thunder. Then I heard screams and howling. One of those screams was from the Mother Confessor.

“I tried frantically to open the door to help her, but I couldn’t. Maybe the door was bolted from the other side as well, I don’t know, but this side was not bolted when I came to get you, I swear.”

Richard tried to open the door as she was talking, but it wouldn’t budge. After slamming into it with his shoulder twice, he knew it was too big and heavy, and with its massive metal strap hinges they were not going to simply break it down. Howls were still coming from the other side.

Driven by urgent need, Richard’s right hand went to the hilt of his sword at his left hip. The rage from the sword was already rising to meet his. Those twin furies, his and the sword’s, spiraled together into a storm of lethal power.

In a near trance of rage, their power joined, Richard drew the sword. The steel, with its dark metallic gleam from having been touched by the world of the dead, rang out as it cleared the scabbard and emerged into the air for the first time in what seemed ages. That singular, deadly sound echoed through the hallways and corridors.

Richard had thought that it would be a long time before he ever needed to draw this ancient weapon again. As had so often happened, that time had come sooner than he expected, but in a way, it was profoundly gratifying to be joined with the sword’s magic once more, to know that it was still there, to feel it rise to his call.

With a cry of fury, holding the weapon in both hands, Richard unleashed a mighty swing. The tip of the blade whistled as it arced through the air. The sword cut an explosive swath through both the massive oak door and the stone walls to either side as if they were no more than mere gossamer. In the relatively confined space, the sound of rock and oak shattering was deafening. Chips of stone, both large and small, as well as a shower of oak splinters, rained down on everyone. The table was covered in crumbles of stone debris. One of the broken iron strap hinges skittered off down the hallway.

As large stone blocks tumbled across the black and white marble floor, the top half of the door let out a groan and then dropped heavily to the ground with a loud thud. Richard kicked over the bottom half and dove sword-first through the billowing dust into darkness.

The room was dark as pitch, with only the meager light of the reflector lamps on the walls in the outer room spilling in through the blasted opening to light a small area of the floor directly inside. It wasn’t much.

In that weak light, Richard saw the Estorian at the end of the room to the left, racing back and forth, crashing into one wall only to rebound and race toward the other, where he leaped up, landed his feet on the stone wall, then bounded back to crash a shoulder into the opposite wall. Back and forth he went at a frantic pace, screaming, howling, and shrieking the whole time. Richard could hardly believe that the rotund man could move with such speed and power.

In between the howls and smacking into walls, the battered Nolo paused briefly to throw his head back and bark like a dog. He seemed oblivious to anyone else being in the room. A mask of blood from crashing into the stone walls covered his face. A large scrap of scalp hung down, exposing bone. Blood ran in rivulets down around his ear. His once-white robes were now wet and red.

All of his wounds and broken bones didn’t seem to bother him or slow him down in the least. He was apparently being driven by some frantic internal need. With his head split open and all the blood he had lost, it was a wonder he was still conscious, much less alive.

Richard frantically peered around the room, trying to see in the dusty darkness.

“Get some light in here!” he yelled back out through the ravaged doorway at the soldiers.

As he did, other big men ran in to capture the howling consul general. Four of them tackled him. Despite their combined weight and strength, they had trouble controlling him. In his frenzy he pushed all four men back, their feet sliding on the floor. They pounced again. With a howl from Nolo, the whole lot of them tumbled to the floor. The man’s arms flailed as he struggled to get free of all the powerful men grappling with him.

Shale rushed into the chaos and squatted, squeezing herself in between the soldiers struggling to hold the howling man down. She placed her hand, her fingers spread, over his face. He shook violently beneath it. He froze abruptly, blinked, and then his eyes rolled up in his head. He finally slumped into an unconscious heap.

Men with torches finally raced into the gloomy room, providing light, but the dust swirling around in the air still drastically cut the visibility. In the illumination provided by the sputtering flames of the torches, Richard was able to see that most of the furniture in the room had been smashed. Splinters from the broken furniture lay scattered all over the floor. A table on its side and a badly misshapen wardrobe were the only things mostly intact.

Richard could see light leaking in through cracks in the outer wall where some of the limestone blocks had been displaced. Those cracks allowed slivers of daylight to show through from outside. Kahlan’s power unleashed in such a confined space had apparently buckled the blocks outward. She must have unleashed everything she had to have nearly blown out the stone walls.

Richard hunted frantically through the dusty darkness, upending the table that lay on its side, flipping over a tented rug, kicking a night table out of his way, searching. He finally spotted Kahlan in a far corner on the opposite side of the room to the right, behind the broken, overturned wardrobe. In the murky light he couldn’t tell if she was all right, or hurt, or even alive.

Richard grabbed a stubby leg of the wardrobe and heaved it back out of his way as he dove in close and knelt down in front of Kahlan. The wardrobe crashed to the ground and broke apart. The Mord-Sith rifled through the murky darkness, looking for any sign of threat.

Slumped back in the corner, Kahlan stared blankly out at nothing. Tears ran down her cheeks as she panted in pain. Men with torches came in close behind Richard to provide more light.

The left sleeve of Kahlan’s dress had been completely torn off at the top of her shoulder. There were three long, deep claw marks starting at her shoulder and running down her arm to the bend in her elbow. The muscle had been laid open down to bone. Nolo wouldn’t have been able to do that. It looked more like she had been mauled by a bear. As horrific as it looked, it at least didn’t appear to have torn open an artery.

Richard, his heart hammering, fought his rising sense of panic as he saw, then, that there was a knife, its handle covered in blood like her white dress, buried to the hilt in the upper left side of her chest, near the top of her breast. There was also a deep, slashing knife wound across the right side of her rib cage from her armpit to her abdomen. The tatters of her dress, soaked with blood, were no longer remotely white. The gash had been deeply sliced open, the knife leaving nicks in each rib it crossed. There was so much blood he couldn’t tell what other injuries she might have.

Kahlan was shaking and panting uncontrollably.

“It’s all right, Kahlan. I’m here,” he said as he gently pulled her toward him with his arm, sitting her up a little, holding her head to his shoulder while in one swift pull he yanked the knife out of her chest then quickly pressed his hand over her breast as he let his gift begin to flow into the wound to staunch the heavy flow of blood.

She let out a sob of pain.

“It’s all right. I’ve got you.”

“Did you see him?” she asked in a quavering voice as he laid her back. “Did you see him?”

“See who?” he asked as he was busy lifting parts of her torn dress aside to appraise her other wounds.

When she didn’t answer, he looked up. She was staring off at nothing.

“See who?” he asked again.

She suddenly looked back at him, gripped his shirt at his throat in her good hand, and pulled herself close. Her green eyes were wild.

“The scribbly man… did you see him?”

Richard didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, and right then and there it didn’t really matter to him. No one had come out of the room, and he knew for a fact that there was no one else in there with them besides Nolo, soldiers, Mord-Sith, and Shale. She was probably delirious from loss of blood.

Shale knelt in beside Richard to help. Vika grabbed her arm to pull her back away.

Richard seized Vika’s wrist. “Leave her be,” he growled. “If not for Shale we wouldn’t have gotten here in time to save Kahlan’s life.”

Vika nodded then, realizing he was right, and released her grip on Shale. “Sorry.”

Shale quickly nodded, as if to say she understood how protective the Mord-Sith were.

Richard frowned, deep in concentration. “I’m stopping the bleeding from this stab wound… but I can feel something more than her wounds.”

Shale pressed her hands to each side of Kahlan’s head and closed her eyes, as if trying to discern what he was feeling.

“You need to stop what you’re doing,” she said with sudden urgency.

“What? She’ll bleed to death!”

“No, you’ve already stopped the bleeding. Your gift is causing her pain.”

“Healing causes pain as you lift their injury,” he said. “I’ve healed her before when she’d been terribly wounded. I’ve done it before and I can do it again.”

“Ordinarily you would be right. This is different.” Shale seized his wrist and forcefully pulled his hand back. “Lord Rahl, you will make it worse if you do it that way.”

“What do you mean, that way? I told you, I’ve healed her before. Healing is healing.”

“Not this time,” she said in a distracted tone. “You need to let me do this if we are to save her life. What you are doing will kill her.” She looked up at him with frantic concern. “If you don’t let me do this, she is going to die!”

Richard hesitated, then sat back up. “Maybe together we can—”

“No. You need to listen to me.” Shale shot him a quick frown honed by years of authority. “I know you want more than anything to help, but trust me, in this case your gift will only make it worse.

“Why don’t you go heal that lunatic? I’m sure you are going to want to question him about what happened in here. You can’t question him if he dies. Right now he is our only link to what is happening and he is in bad shape. He didn’t leave these claw marks. We need to know what did.”

Richard felt sick seeing the bone in her arm where the meat was laid back. Even the white bone had long gouge marks down it. He ran his fingers through his hair as he sat back on his heels.

Shale obviously knew what she was doing, even if he wasn’t at all happy about not being able to help.

Holding the sides of Kahlan’s head, Shale used her thumbs to gently close her eyes. It was somehow less frightening seeing Kahlan with her eyes closed. When they were opened, he could see the terror.

Richard didn’t know what she had seen, but it was clear how much it had frightened her. Kahlan was not easily shaken, but she was now.

Once her eyes were closed, her panting slowed to even breathing, though it was ragged with stitches of pain. Leaving Shale to work on Kahlan, Richard reluctantly turned to seeing about the unconscious Nolo. He wasn’t really interested in saving Nolo’s life, but Shale was right about their need to question him. Something other than Nolo had attacked Kahlan, and they needed to know what it was.

Questioning the man had been what Kahlan had been trying to do with her Confessor ability. Richard had seen her use her power since the first day he’d met her. It was as profound a use of the gift as he had ever seen. There was nothing that could stand up against it… as long as what it was being used on was human. He couldn’t imagine what had gone wrong this time.

The soldiers stepped back out of his way as Richard placed the flat of his hand over the bleeding head wound to make sure the skull wasn’t cracked. He found that it was. He released a flow of healing power through his gift. He wasn’t careful about being gentle with how he did it. He didn’t care how much it hurt the man, only that he lived. He forced bone together to close the crack and stop the loss of blood and fluid.

Even so, lifting such a severe injury from anyone was not only difficult, but caused agony to the one doing the healing. The more severe the injury or sickness, the greater the pain.

He knew that Shale would be in far greater pain taking the agony of Kahlan’s wounds into herself in order to heal her.

Richard was so concerned about Kahlan that he endured the stress of healing the man’s cracked skull almost without noticing the suffering he took into himself. Once he had the underlying structure repaired, he replaced the flap of scalp, placed a hand over it, and sent a flow of his gift into the wound.

Richard found that the man had several broken ribs, a broken collarbone, and a broken wrist. The ribs were relatively easy to mend with his gift, but the wrist was unexpectedly complex to heal. It had to be done in layers, bone by bone, until everything was back in place and the wrist moved as it should.

By the time Richard had finished and finally stood, his face was covered with a sheen of sweat. Nolo would still be unconscious for a time, but at least he wasn’t going to die.

“Take him to the dungeon,” he told the soldiers. “Put him in restraints so he can’t hurt himself. It was a lot of work healing him. I don’t want him splitting his head open again. I’m going to want to question him and I want him to be able to give me answers.”

The soldiers all clapped fists to hearts before bending to the task. Even with four men, one on each arm and each leg, it was difficult to lug the dead weight of the heavy man out of the room.

Richard turned his attention back to Kahlan just as Shale stood. She gripped Richard’s arm as he came close.

“It’s all right, Lord Rahl. I’ve put her into a deep, healing sleep. The worst of the danger is past. I think she will be fine, but I’ve only pulled wounds together to stabilize her until we can get her to her room, where I can finish the work.”

Richard nodded. “What about those three gouges down her arm?”

“I closed them as best I could for now, but her injuries are going to take a great deal more work to set everything right. I will need to fix the underlying layers so that her arm will work properly. I will need to work further down into the stab wound in her chest. Fortunately, while it did severe damage, it didn’t cut her heart and kill her. It can all be healed.”

Richard stared down at Kahlan. “What do you think did that—left those gouges down her arm?”

Shale hesitated. “What I can tell you is that Nolo didn’t make them.” She looked back down at Kahlan. “We should get her out of here and to bed. She needs to be cleaned up and I need to continue my work.”

Richard bent down and carefully scooped Kahlan up in his arms. He didn’t want anyone else carrying her.

Holding her in his arms, Richard looked to the six Mord-Sith. “Cassia, Vale, Berdine, Rikka, Nyda—I want you all to stay in the room with Kahlan and watch over her. Vika, I’ll let you continue to have my back.”

“Yes, Lord Rahl,” they said as one.

“And I want you all in your red leather.”

Their expressions grim, they all nodded.

“Let’s go.”